If this moves to the USA, ssh won't help. The telecom companies will simply have the congress they paid good money for outlaw encrypted communications - either as DMCA II (gotta protect "intellectual property") or PATRIOT III (gotta stop those "terrorists" from hiding their nefarious schemes).

For a Dutch citizen who fully embraces the web, this is all very painful. You'd expect a sane government to set up regulations to block this immediately. But we don't really have a sane government, and with the current climate I don't expect it to happen anytime soon.

It's also surprising that the Opta does not oppose this move, since the current mobile telecom oligopoly can easily force such things down everyone's throats. Someone needs to protect consumers.

One can only hope this this will come under heavy scrutiny by the European Union.

For a Dutch citizen who fully embraces the web, this is all very painful. You'd expect a sane government to set up regulations to block this immediately. But we don't really have a sane government, and with the current climate I don't expect it to happen anytime soon.

It's also surprising that the Opta does not oppose this move, since the current mobile telecom oligopoly can easily force such things down everyone's throats. Someone needs to protect consumers.

One can only hope this this will come under heavy scrutiny by the European Union.

Hopefully if the markets become oligopolies, then EC will step in like with roaming charges.

but they'd never succeed in making me pay (or my company) for the use of any of those 'services' (at least not more than I'm paying now).

I'd just make more use of my phone's wifi connection. And the moment a new provider arises who does not fragment access like that, I'd make sure we move to the less restrictive provider 'sito presto'...

I'm a T-Mobile subscriber in The Netherlands, and the moment T-Mobile announces something like this, I'd love to cancel my contract, even if it's mid-contract. However, being a self-employed translator, I MUST have a mobile 3G connection. I can't live without it. The prospect of all carriers here following KPN's footsteps...

I work for a mid-sized ISP (a few dozen thousand subscribers) and I can tell you, if we tried to pull this kind of shit here, our customers would basically hang us by the balls. It's equivalent to lowering speeds or raising prices mid-contract - people may be stupid, but they are not *that* stupid. And once they see that you're asking for more money to let them access their beloved FaceTube, which they used to get for the price of their existing contract, you can pretty much spend all the extra money from such a scheme on lawyers, as you'll be flooded with lawsuits.

As a mid-sized ISP you can't do this, people have choices, but if you were AT&T, or one of the other large carriers with a large base who have no other option, you can pretty much tell your customers to piss up a pole. When they get mad, block any attempts build alternatives with fees, regulations, and paid-for-laws.

Anyway, throttling is a much better way to deal with the issue. Just throttle Facebook and Youtube down to 14.4 modem speeds, and upsell them on a speed package or more expensive plan with expensive prerequisites. To paraphrase a trainer, "If you want them to do something, make the alternative hurt."

Even with mid-sized ISPs, there are areas where we have exclusivity. That, however, isn't be point. The point is that even if we were a big carrier, even throttling the sites mentioned would generate so much bad publicity that the brand image damage would by far outweigh potential short-term financial gains. Your short term profits might increase, but sales would decline rapidly after having effectively ruined any goodwill of your company.

Try telling Telstra that. Australia's formerly government formerly post-masters office, overpriced telco With all the lines and all the towers. They simply don't need to be competetive or be nice because they're the only option for coverage for a lot of people.

Anyway, throttling is a much better way to deal with the issue. Just throttle Facebook and Youtube down to 14.4 modem speeds, and upsell them on a speed package or more expensive plan with expensive prerequisites. To paraphrase a trainer, "If you want them to do something, make the alternative hurt."

No. They should charge for what they deliver, and that charge should be what it costs them plus a profit margin. So they should charge for either traffic or bandwidth, not specific services *that others create*.

One of the problems KPN is having right now is the reduced usage of SMS services, since much cheaper alternatives now exist via Internet. SMS has been wildly overcharged for so long now they've gotten used to what is mostly free money. They want to block SMS-like internet services as well, and not because they take up bandwidth, but just because it competes with their own overcharged services.

... it's simple. Stop using mobile and even land networks. Although I need some kind of connection to work, as a private person I don't.

If my employer expects me to be able to connect off company premises, it should provide me with the means.

As a private person, it's all and nice to be able to surf the Web and play games, but I really don't need it to live.

Voice operators that have also Internet services should have adapted ages ago. Voice lines are dying and everyone has known it for at least 10 years. You just have to look how mobile networks work to see that. GSM and subsequent tecnologies (GPRS/EDGE, UMTS, etc) all work digitally, so they carry data. It really doesn't matter much if it's voice or not. Semantics.

Now, I do agree that the amount of data carried through the networks has grown immensely. But so what? So have the technologies for data communication. Who would have thought of having a 24Mbit/s connection at home just 5 years ago? OK, the investment for the carriers to have those technologies is big. But I also think that for normal use, a home user doesn't need to have more than 8Mbit/s. It's enough. It's nice to be able to download faster, but it also depends on the other side, so it's enough.

People want more. More, more, more... even if they waste it. More! The amount of food wasted in restaurants, the amount of pollution coming from our cars because we can't get out sooner 5 minutes and accelerate to be on time, when would save a lot of fuel and produce less pollution if we drove slower.

Want to charge for discriminated contents? Do it. I won't pay. I would prefer to pay for books, driving to friends' houses or metting them somewhere. Social networks? They have their uses, but they aren't Life. Movies online? I won't die if I watch less movies.

I just don't understand people living online and needing all this traffic.

As for these carriers trying to artificially get more money at the cost of their customers, you will die a slow death. Just look at the music "industry".

I don't think you can lay the entire blame on consumers. The reason technology advances as such a pace is simply because companies are trying to bring in new customers. In a world where nearly everyone has a TV, internet and mobile phone, the only way you can get new customers is to either:
* build bigger TV screens, more powerful mobile phones and faster internet
* or sell cheaper phone and internet contracts.

Seeming as it's hard to compete in price and still turn a profit, many businesses turn to offering the next most powerful device to attract customers.

At the end of the day, the global economy is dependant on consumers continually upgrading. Take the Ninento example on the front page: most people who want a Wii already own a Wii. So Nintendo either have to face slumping profits or release a new console. If Nintendo choose not to upgrade, then they will eventually go out of business and employees will lose their job. If everyone stopped upgrading their phone or buying new TVs, then Samsung would very quickly run into financial difficulty. And if all these companies went under then unemployment would rise. When unemployment rises even less people are in the position to buy luxuries from electronics to alcohol. So job cuts rise further which leads to even less spending and even more job cuts in turn.

Like it or not, our global economy is as dependant on new technology enticing new consumers as it is us consumers buying up the latest greatest piece of plastic indulgence.

If this sort of crap is allowed to become common-place for wireless carriers, how long do you think it will take for wired ISPs to follow suit? They've certainly been crying about nasty customers eating up all their precious bandwidth for longer than their mobile counterparts.

The Internet needs to be declared a common utility, just like electricity and water. Just like these utilities, when there is a shortage you should be limited so that you aren't able to get more than your share, but how you use it should never come into question.

Like others have stated, the only way to send the message that this is unacceptable is to simply vote with your wallet. If these new "business models" fail, then they'll have to try something less awful.

Fortunately, and this is the only time I'll speak well of Australian ISPs, they only just started offering unmetered Facebook access on their mobile plans. Any provider doing a complete about-face like thiswould suffer for it. Except maybe Telstra.

KPN was selling subscriptions that were making them enough money if people made phonecalls, send SMS messages and used the UNLIMITED databundel that you get for only 10 Euro for a bit of browsing and emailing.

Now people are using that crazy cheap, unlimited databundle for making phonecalls (Skype), sending messages (What's App, Twitter, FaceBook) and for LOTS of datatraffic like videos, tettering, dozens of apps, etc.

It is no longer profitable for KPN to keep selling those unlimited databundles for 10 Euro. Instead of raising the price for everyone they are trying to find a way to keep the baseprice low, but make people pay extra for things that are making them money now (phonecalls, text) or costs lots of bandwidth (youtube, tettering)

Of course this isn't a good approach! It will mean subscriptions will get much more difficult (this is called "choice" by KPN) and costs much less transparant for their customers. What they should do is admit that unlimited for 10 Euro is no longer possible and charge x Euro for every y MB (1 Euro for 100 MB?). This doesn't solve their problem of losing income from Voice and SMS replacements though, so I can see why they choose this solution

I disagree. They should charge by bandwidth. E.g. 10 Euro per month for 1MBit/s, 20 Euro per month for 3.6 MBit, etc.

Such subscriptions may amount to bandwidth limits, but have two advantages:

- No hidden bills for customers if you go through a monthly allotted limit.
- Even if you have an 1Mbit/s subscription, you could use VOIP services, but the quality will just be worse than 3.6 of 7.2 MBit/s.

Anyway, the main issue with KPNs new policy is that it discriminates against new services. Suppose that I make a great new service that changes the mobile world. KPN could decide they want their share of the pie (by adding it to a more expensive package), or block the service completely. This of course, is not fair, they are just providing the infrastructure.

Charging for bandwidth (per second) instead of used bandwidth (per month) is probably not a viable option for KPN. The problem is that with 1 Mbit per second you can still cause about 300 Gigabyte of bandwidth per month.

Charging for bandwidth (per month) is actually a very good motivator for KPN NOT to block "the next killer-app" because it would earn them money. Also, the Opta (supervising organisation) seems to allow charging extra for access to applications. It is extremely unlikely that they would allow blocking applications entirely

I am not happy at all with this change by KPN, but I think we will have to realise that the current situation (unlimited internet for 10 Euro) is simply not sustainable. If it DOES turn out to be sustainable for other companies KPN will see lots of people switch to those companies and not make any money anymore (free market FTW). Of course, that requires a healthy, competitive market and this might not be the case (oligopoly with a very high limit for new companies to enter the market). The end result would then be that consumers will have to pay more and that all companies in this oligopoly will make more money than before. And then Opta should intervene

Charging for bandwidth (per second) instead of used bandwidth (per month) is probably not a viable option for KPN. The problem is that with 1 Mbit per second you can still cause about 300 Gigabyte of bandwidth per month.

Seriously, who is using full bandwidth all day? People have to sleep, work, spend time with their children, etc. So as long as a phone is not used as a modem to download (why would you, since Ziggo offers connections with 120MBit downstream?), even the most demanding users would probably use 1/30th and the rest of the consumers far less.

I am not happy at all with this change by KPN, but I think we will have to realise that the current situation (unlimited internet for 10 Euro) is simply not sustainable.

It is, at proper bandwidths. Anyway, we both agree on the fact that this is not a good solution to the problem (regardless of whether the problem actually exists).

I disagree. They should charge by bandwidth. E.g. 10 Euro per month for 1MBit/s, 20 Euro per month for 3.6 MBit, etc.

I agree. That's exactly what I have in fact: I pay 9.90e a month for 1Mbps bandwidth, no restrictions on the amount or type of the data transmitted except for BitTorrent data which they do not want to have to deal with. (I can understand that, though, and I atleast have no reason to complain about such when everything else is so great) Absolutely fantastic to use.

I disagree. They should charge by bandwidth. E.g. 10 Euro per month for 1MBit/s, 20 Euro per month for 3.6 MBit, etc.

Technically would result in an overburdened network. Your phone will be trying to connect to the tower at maximum speed available, thus using up the same bandwidth you would be using up by actually using the network that powers the tower. There is no bandwidth problem of the network that powers the towers, the problem is the actual radio spectrum overcrowding...

Technically would result in an overburdened network. Your phone will be trying to connect to the tower at maximum speed available, thus using up the same bandwidth you would be using up by actually using the network that powers the tower. There is no bandwidth problem of the network that powers the towers, the problem is the actual radio spectrum overcrowding...

Of course the phone will be able to connect to the network at max speed, it's the bandwidth that is limited and that is all software. As for techically being possible... well, it ALREADY IS in country-wide use here in Finland, all major operators do it and it works just peachy.

Mobile Internet services are shady, connectivity is often laking and you get shaped and throttled all the way to Tokio and back. It's not nearly the same kind and quality of Internet you get from a 10 Euro a month DSL or cable line.

Besides I actually pay 5 Euro's a month extra on top of this 10 Euro's to legally be allowed to use Skype/Voip with my Vodafone contract.

At the same time, as Tom said, if you actually read your contract + the "Algemene Voorwaarden" (terms of service) you find out that you agreed to not being allowed to do anything with your expensive monthly subscription.

Almost all these terms state that your not allowed to 'keep a active connection open', which automatically kills any form of chat application, streaming applications etc.

Then things like Internet radio, Internet video and 'large downloads' are explicitly banned, as are pinging services, voip, non-sms texting, any content that is deemed 'unfit'.

All written in nice vague broad terms of-course... Strictly speaking my IMAP e-mail connection from my phone is breaking the terms of service.

So no, I do not think this is cheap.... I actually think this is very expensive... Then I have not talked about them (legally) stealing a bit of my money each month...

Because to be able to buy/rent this extra voip service on my phone I also have to agree on a large contract with many 'calling minutes' each month. Now every month I'm allowed to keep a maximum of 2x my-subscription worth of minutes. (normal practice in telco land i believe) Which means that every month many minutes I bought and paid for suddenly disappear.

And now they are saying there not making enough money ?? while they are (imho) legally stealing my money away each month.... and still charging ridicules amount of money for an almost-zero-cost sms message ?

I say telco's are like the entertainment industry. They created a world in which they can legally rob people blind and when something better comes along there crying about how terrible it all is.

You see, I live in Brazil. Brazil has basically no laws on internet access, network regulation and so on - like most other countries out there. The only bill pending votation right now makes the DMCA look like a rather nice response to actual theft (not piracy, which makes copies - real theft). Thankfully, our current president has demonstrated signs that she'll most likely veto it...

Nevertheless, our carriers here are pretty much free to do whatever the hell they want - one of them (TIM, a subsidiary of the homonimous italian carrier) has charged for YouTube and video access in the past, much like what you describe, Thom. (It failed miserably - basically everyone found a way to access it without paying extra for the service).

My current carrier (Vivo), which is a subsidiary of Telefónica (kind of our O2), not only does not forbid VOIP services, but encourages users to tether their devices, to use our connection however we want. It even talks about it on its corporate blog.
The reason for that? Obviously, I don't know, but I speculate that it helps that 1/4 of their revenue and 1/3 of their profit comes from data plans. Much like AT&T, there are no unlimited plans - if we surpass our bandwidth tier, we can either choose to falldown to EDGE-like speed or to pay per MB.

IMHO, that is probably the best move for any given carrier - all of them obviously care about profitability, but should also care about user satisfaction, finding ways to unite rather than separate those things (also getting free propaganda doing so, which is what I've just done for Vivo and Telefónica).

Dude, your English is fine . No need to apologise for something you do better than some native speakers I know.

In all honesty, I'm not entirely sure what a good way to go would be. I dread the day my ISP starts charging extra for something like Xbox Live, which I use almost on a daily basis. XBL is a great service, and definitely worth the 60E a year I pay for it. However, the idea that my ISP might charge like an additional 10E per month... That doesn't make me happy. I'd probably just pay up though, because without my weekly dose of L4D/L4D2, I wouldn't survive. One of my best friends and I are heavy co-op players in many games, and I use XBL more regularly, and for longer, than I have ever used my digital HD TV subscription.

I just think that per-service charges are idiotic, in the same sense that I don't pay more per liter of water in my toilet than for a liter of water in my shower. I would say a per-MB or per-GB charge might make sense, but even that is very debatable - as internet speeds go ever up, the price of a single MB or GB ought to go down. However, we all know it won't.

In all honesty, I'm not entirely sure what a good way to go would be. I dread the day my ISP starts charging extra for something like Xbox Live, which I use almost on a daily basis. XBL is a great service, and definitely worth the 60E a year I pay for it. However, the idea that my ISP might charge like an additional 10E per month... That doesn't make me happy. I'd probably just pay up though, because without my weekly dose of L4D/L4D2, I wouldn't survive. One of my best friends and I are heavy co-op players in many games, and I use XBL more regularly, and for longer, than I have ever used my digital HD TV subscription.

Listen to yourself!

How weak have we become... when we cannot live our daily lives without paying for entertainment to "survive".

I'll tell you what I would do, without skipping a beat: boycott.

Of course, I've already trained myself for the last 6 or so years to not rely on mobile communications - it started when I needed to save money and the cell phone was a "luxury" - then it became a life choice when i realized the liberation of not having one with me at all times.

The internet is next - I've become much dependent on it, but the minute I have to start paying a premium to access certain websites that are otherwise free, that's the minute I 1) stop visiting them and/or 2) ditch my ISP. Hell, I'd go back to dialup if I had to. Basic access to information is all I want.

No need to worry about your English. Its quite good. If it were submitted as an essay in university it would get marked up in a few places, but *every* paper submitted by a native English speaker would as well.

I'm still proud of the paper I submitted which received a negative 66.

True and besides in the Netherlands telco's have extra ordinary civil power... there one of a few types of company how can directly change/kill the credit rating.
(BKR-Registratie)

In that world using something like ssh/tor/whatnot will probably mean instant guiltiness of trying to circumvent payment measures...

I have little hopes for these companies to become 'nice' to there customers...

As far as I know, KPN and Vodafone (in NL) where already busy putting up new restrictions on mobile data usage. Things like you get 100MB a month of fast Internet connection the rest will be painfully slow unless you buy extra 'fast-megabytes'.

I have a mobile phone from KPN with flat fee internet but I'm not so worried.

We've had exactly the same thing going on a couple of months ago, where the same company wanted to get rid of the flat fee mobile internet contracts because they claimed the network suffered too much from it. They canceled that because of T-Mobile that didn't want to do that.

I suspect if KPN goes on with its current plans T-Mobile will simply say, well we've considered it but we're not gonna do it and a lot of KPN customers will switch to them. T-Mobile might be setting up a trap here for KPN.

I'm not using anything on my phone that KPN intends to block, like youtube, facebook whatsapp etc (I only dial, text, email and read the news sometimes) but if KPN thinks they can deep-inspect my packets they're wrong, I'll instantly switch to another telco and a lot of customers that do use these services will as well.

Texting is namely done by young people that don't have a lot of money for it that's why all teenagers in The Netherlands have a Blackberry now so they can ping as much as they want for a flat fee. There's NO WAY in the world that these people are gonna pay extra to make use of facebook, KPN is just unrealistic here.

KPN is known here as an evil company so there plans don't surprise me at all but in the end it will only cost them money. If it was for KPN everybody would still be online with a 14k4 modem paying 15 euros an hour for it.

I suspect if KPN goes on with its current plans T-Mobile will simply say, well we've considered it but we're not gonna do it and a lot of KPN customers will switch to them. T-Mobile might be setting up a trap here for KPN.

Only customers who use bandwidth-intensive services will switch. T-Mobile likes more customers, but in the right mix. The users who only download five e-mails per day compensate the folks who watch singing dogs on Youtube five hours per day. So, that's not a nice prospect for T-Mobile.

The three carriers will probably follow suit, because there is a huge opportunity to cash-in. E.g. take instant messaging, which is low-bandwidth compared to VOIP, and people will probably still pay for it, because it's cheaper than SMS (outside the bundle).

Yeah, the EU is probably our only hope, but I'm not sure how long this love story between the EU and the humble consumers will last. Corporations are strong and the EU is just a collection of governments. Sooner or later it will be strongarmed by the corporations just like each of our national governments.

Here in Argentina, six years ago, one of the broadband oligopoly, Telecom, wanted to limit the bandwidth usage of their crappy Arnet service up to 4GB a month, I/O. They used the rationale, among other things, that they wanted to stop piracy, that normal users wouldn´t use more than that, etc. For usage exceeding 4GB a month, they would start charging extra.

Such a disgust arose from this, that a nationwide, grass-roots movement took place. Someone set up a site to collect signatures and comments. Hundreds of thousands of people, if I recall correctly, signed. Such was the disgust with this measure (among other things, because we knew that if one of the carriers did this, the rest would follow) that it attracted media attention, and famous people started talking against this carrier. Many people, who already were Arnet subscribers, out of disgust cancelled their subscription, even though the carrier promised not to touch existing subscriber conditions...

The end result: they not only backed off this stratagem but, in time, their service started to suck a lot less. And no other carrier (for wired services, that is) even hinted to move this way.

Consumers are not defenseless babies. This all started with the outrage of thousands, but the initiative and web site of just one. People even donated to support the costs of hosting of his petition site.

Just to be clear, these policies are only going to apply to mobile access. Since the current legislation makes an exception for mobile, it would only harm the companies who are not at fault while giving a free pass to the ones that are.

Isn't there a chance here that a company that doesn't do this will simply pick up all the pissed off customers or are they ALL in on it?

In a limited oligopoly situation such as this, it is even more likely that competitors will just match to the same type of plan. As the customer has nowhere else to go and the market has massive barriers to entry there is no risk in the other companies milking their customers dry either.

They are collude not illegally but still this passive collusion is detrimental to the consumer.

"I sincerely hope they have the balls to do so, but a cynical voice in the back of my head whispers - what if the services are actually in on this? What if they'll actually be getting a cut? What if they've been negotiating deals like this specifically to make a little extra income? I mean, Google owns YouTube, and Google is in favour of a fragmented mobile web with no respect for privacy.

If that's the case - then we're screwed."

The solution is simple - stop using these services. If Google and Fecebook see their Dutch market drop to 0, they will rethink the whole situation.